{"id":14394,"date":"2024-05-31T15:31:00","date_gmt":"2024-05-31T15:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/?p=14394"},"modified":"2024-09-16T15:31:29","modified_gmt":"2024-09-16T15:31:29","slug":"fake-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2024\/05\/31\/fake-games\/","title":{"rendered":"fake games"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Image\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

what is the portal in this essay? i think the wild thing is that we play fake games with ourselves. we cargo cult ourselves. we do inert things to avoid doing \u2018active\u2019 things that might cause things to change which might be disruptive, since change is painful and scary<\/p>\n\n\n\n

play fake games, win fake prizes?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

i want to know what fake games i am playing with myself, so that i can cut them out and play real ones instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have a vague memory of several instances of this growing up: a group of children are playing a game, and someone\u2019s parent asks them to include a younger kid. \u201cLet him play!\u201d (I\u2019m thinking particularly of boys and video games, but this can also apply to \u2018real life\u2019 games as well.) The older kids grumble and protest, because they know that the younger kid doesn\u2019t fully understand the game that they\u2019re playing, at least not to the same \u2018level\u2019. If they\u2019re playing soccer, for example, the younger kid might simply be interested in kicking the ball, and not really understand that there are goals to be scored and defended against. If they\u2019re playing Halo, the younger kid may not understand that there\u2019s some team objective like capture the flag, and simply be interested in pressing buttons on the controller. They might be causing friendly fire incidents and hurting their own teammates, but they don\u2019t care, they\u2019re simply having fun playing. What\u2019s fun for the low-level player is frustrating and disruptive for the higher-level players. (It could maybe be argued that it\u2019s only frustrating for slightly higher-level players, whereas super-enlightened lvl 999 ultra-high players or something have learned to surf the chaos of low-level beginners, and enjoy the mess that involves. Off the top of my head, Kung Fu Panda comes to mind, with Master Oogway operating at an even higher level than Master Shifu.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes a very enlightened group of kids might collectively agree to prioritize the younger kid\u2019s fun, effectively putting aside the game they were intending to play. More often than not, if my memory serves me well, what typically happens is something like a muddlesome compromise\u2013 like in the case of soccer, the primary game falls apart, and the kids \u2018devolve\u2019 into kicking the ball around. It\u2019s not quite ideal, but it\u2019s what often happens. It\u2019s similar to what happens, I think, when someone with \u2018bad vibes\u2019 joins a group, and nobody really knows how to handle it, or wants to. The primary game \u2018devolves\u2019 into something \u2018lower level\u2019. Sometimes the group eventually breaks up and maybe reconvenes somewhere else. Lots of communities and even organizations seem to have lifecycles where they eventually accumulate an excess of blundersome \u2018low-level\u2019 players, aren\u2019t quite able to metabolize them, and become stale\/zombified or even collapse entirely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With video games, some kids figure out a clever solution of giving the younger kid a controller that isn\u2019t actually plugged in. (\u201cGive them a fake job so they don\u2019t mess anything up\u201d is an approach that\u2019s used interestingly in other situations<\/a>, too.) If the kid is sufficiently young enough that they can\u2019t tell the difference, I honestly think it\u2019s not a bad idea, especially if it\u2019s done in a way that\u2019s inclusive. I\u2019m reminded of bass virtuoso Victor Wooten talking about how he was born into a musical family, and how even before he learned to play any instrument, his siblings would still involve him in their play, and he would jive along with a toy instrument\u2013 and this wasn\u2019t mocking or dismissive, rather it was intended to get him familiar with the musical environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I believe this whole train of thought about levels of play began for me while I was reflecting more broadly about the games I am playing, my own levels of competence in those games, any conflicting sub-selves I might have at different levels of development, and so on. I don\u2019t really want to keep getting self-referential and talking about my essays in my essays, but it seems like maybe the only way out for me here is through\u2026 so let\u2019s talk a bit about the games of writing, tweeting, essay-writing and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve been tweeting a lot for some time now. I\u2019m good at it. I enjoy it. I enjoyed it even when I didn\u2019t have an audience, and now that I do<\/em> have an audience, it complicates things somewhat, because it\u2019s easy to enjoy the thoughtful engagement that I get from posting basically anything on my mind. The opportunity cost here is\u2013 if I\u2019m not careful, I can end up spending all my time on twitter for days, weeks, months on end, and not spend much time working on more substantial things that I\u2019d like to be working on. And here we could get into a side-debate about revealed preferences and \u201cdo I really<\/em> want to be writing essays, or am I just pretending to myself, while actually I want to be tweeting?\u201d \u2013 but for me that\u2019s not something I feel much confusion about. I\u2019ve written a couple of books, and I\u2019m really glad I did, and if I could press a button to retroactively erase half of my tweets from the last 2 years and write the equivalent volume of text in essays instead, I would do that. But since I can\u2019t, the next best thing I can do is to simply prioritize essay-writing. Which is what I\u2019m trying to do here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Actually I\u2019m thinking it would be worthwhile to simulate a conversation between Essayist Visa and Tweeter Visa\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Separately, I was thinking recently about \u201cgoldilocks zones\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

what is the portal in this essay? i think the wild thing is that we play fake games with ourselves. we cargo cult ourselves. we do inert things to avoid doing \u2018active\u2019 things that might cause things to change which might be disruptive, since change is painful and scary play… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[730],"class_list":["post-14394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-substack"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-3Ka","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14394"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14395,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14394\/revisions\/14395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}